I’ve read several studies over the years about interruptions in the workplace and how they affect our productivity. I, like many sales professionals, enjoyed the fast pace that interruptions created without knowing how much it was hurting my ability to get my key tasks done. All the studies point to the same thing — that the time it takes to handle the interruption isn’t the big time sucker — it’s the time it takes you to get back to the same level of focus and concentration. The estimates run from a low of 6 minutes to a high of 23 minutes as noted in a recent Fast Company article.

If you are needing to focus on a task, let’s say, making prospecting calls, if you get interrupted even 1 time per hour, you are losing over 12 hours per week or over the course of a year, over 12 weeks of productivity! Crazy but true.

Our workshop, “Goal Aligned Time,” provides many strategies to overcome this massive time sucker but a simple one to implement immediately is to do your emails in batches. Stack them up and plow through several at once rather than jumping on each one as it comes in.

Stop kidding yourself that “busy” means “productive”. Once you understand the vast difference between these terms, you’ll be able to watch your sales grow!

Michael

To learn more about our “Goal Aligned Time” workshop or arrange a complimentary one for your sales team (in the Greater Toronto Area), contact me at mcaron@northboundsales.com or 416.456.1440.

Being “on and available” all the time can kill your focus and energy.

Because nobody’s invented a Star Trek style transporter yet, smart phones are probably the coolest mass market gadget in the world. They are a wonder of technology and give anyone the ability to communicate with us by voice, email, social media or texting – the growing preferred choice of many of us. They are also a dictionary, calculator, web browser, gaming console, calendar, to-do list, voice recorder, music player, weather forecaster, GPS, movie screen and flashlight. We’re all living in an era where these different communication tools force us to do several things at once.

While the ability to send a message to someone and know that it’s received is very powerful, too much of it can become a negative. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. The danger to your productivity, focus and energy is much greater than what you think and is taking it’s toll. It’s time to get control back.

A recent study by neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient. He argues that our brains are busier than ever with constant bombardment of facts, pseudo-facts, opinion and rumour – all posing as relevant information. Do you really need to know that your friend had a great pizza at lunch today? He continues by adding that trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more.

We check our phones on average, about 150 times per day. We text while walking down the street; check emails while lining up for our coffee; we even carry on text conversations discreetly while we’re in a face-to-face conversation with a real human being right in front of us. We take an immense amount of pride in being “busy” and in our ability to multi-task. Sadly, in our society, it’s become a badge of honour.

But Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking by emailing and texting while doing something else, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” He says that even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.

I’ve read several studies that come to the same conclusion. Multi-tasking is a misnomer. Not only does the quantity of your work go down, but also the quality. In addition, more recent research is linking our attempts at multi-tasking to a serious degrading of our ability to focus. It also sucks our mental energy away – something that today’s knowledge workers need more of, not less of. Stress levels, along with the stress hormone cortisol, rocket up with every text we deal with, every email we “have to get back to” and every Facebook update. The increase in effectiveness is a fallacy. Many experts agree that it can actually reduce your I.Q.!

Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal, found that the same part of the brain that lights up with dopamine when a gambler wins a bet or drug addicts take cocaine, is affected when someone responds to an email or text. As Daniel Levitin says, “Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out “More! More! Give me more!” It’s an addiction and as with any addiction, the addict won’t be able to kick it until they admit that they are truly addicted.

A simple solution is simply to turn off all your notifications and choose to check your messages periodically. You can control your devices. They don’t have to control you.

For dozens of time management and focus strategies, check out Northbound’s Goal Aligned Time workshop. For more details, contact Michael Caron at mcaron@northboundsales.com.

Most executives would say if there is one area of their life where there is a serious time and priority mismatch, it would with their family. To juggle conflicting priorities between work and home is not a balancing act for the faint of heart. Most executives are a living contradiction in that, while surveys show that family is generally their number one priority, it is rarely ranks number one in volume of time or in planning of commitments.

Why? Usually it’s because people have gotten into the habit of letting work related “urgent” activities bump family time off the agenda. Your son or daughter isn’t going to send you an e-mail or a text message firmly stating that they want to have dinner with you or go play in the park.

Turning your priorities into action starts with having a clear set of goals that reflect your values and emphasizes all the different areas of your life such as family, career, financial, health, social, spiritual and recreational. Think of these areas as being the spokes in a wheel with you at the centre. If one of more spokes are broken, the wheel doesn’t turn smoothly. If enough spokes are missing or broken, the wheel doesn’t move at all.

Here are some ways to get control of your life:

ONE – Set some goals: Ironically, the number one reason people don’t set goals is that they are afraid of failing to reach them. This flies in the face of reams of research indicating that having goals ALWAYS achieves better results than without! Goal setting must be accompanied by a realistic yet challenging execution plan. Start with your life goals, then break that down into yearly goals, monthly goals.

TWO – Plan your time to match: Plan your week in advance. Each week, I pull out my month’s goals and ask myself, “What can I do this week to help drive me closer to my goals?” I break my monthly goals into smaller “bite-size” chunks and then plug them as to-do’s into a specific day. A goal without a plan is just a dream.

THREE – Categorize your actions: Goals and time management are inextricably linked. Effective time management is actually just goal setting in a short time frame. Take your tasks and mark them as A’s or B’s. A’s are things that must get done in the time frame that you’re planning for (i.e. day, week or month) while B’s can wait if necessary. Note: They are both important. The A/B distinction is only for urgency. If something’s not important, why are you spending any time on it anyway?

FOUR – Do it again! At the end of day, note how you did and plan for the next day. If you would like to learn more check out our Goal Aligned Time™ program.

Congratulations for reading this! Procrastination has been appropriately called the “silent killer of careers” yet few people have ever had formal training on how to overcome this immensely costly habit. All of us procrastinate to some extent but While managing this problem is a constant challenge to me, I have learned some strategies over the years that have worked very well:

Urgency versus Importance: The first step in overcoming procrastination is to understand that by definition, urgent activities are done before non-urgent. On the surface, this seems to make sense until you take into account the additional factor of importance. In Northbound’s “Goal Aligned Time™” program, we train people on how to place every activity in their personal and business life on a quadrant with these two variables before they decide what to put on their plan. Important tasks are often not urgent and so get pushed off the agenda. Unfortunately these are also frequently “growth” activities such as prospecting and skills development on the career side and on the personal side, might be things such as exercise and building stronger relationships. Have the discipline to schedule these activities so they get done and start saying “No” to low value, urgent activities that are screaming for your attention.

The 15 Minute Strategy: Psychologist David Burns recommends simply making a promise with yourself that you will give some task you’ve been putting off just 15 minutes of effort. His point is that we often become overwhelmed by the sheer size of a task and talk ourselves out of it. We might tell ourselves, “It’s going to take soooo long” or “It’s too big to do now. I’ll leave it until I can really focus on it”. Instead, talk back and say, “OK, I’ll just give it 15 minutes and then I can stop”. How hard can 15 minutes of anything be? Once you get started, you will have broken that psychological barrier. Most often, you’ll find that it’s not nearly as hard as you thought it was going to be and you’ll either keep going or not fear it so much next time.

Think of the End Result: Instead of thinking of how difficult the process may be to accomplish something, think rather on the end result and all the great things that it will mean to you. Turn thoughts of “I hate cold calling. It’s not much fun” into, “If I make 2 hours of calls, I’ll probably book one meeting. I usually close one out of two meetings so I’m 50% towards a sale if I make some calls!” Once your brain clearly connects the doing of a task with major benefits, you’ll be unstoppable!

You and your team can learn dozens of other proven time management strategies with Northbound’s Goal Aligned Time™ workshop. Graduates report an average productivity increase of 12%! For more information or pricing, contact Michael Caron at mcaron@northboundsales.com, 416.456.1440

These days, anything with a big positive return on investment sounds too good to be true. We’re not talking about financial investments per se here but rather something just as valuable—your time management. And more accurately, we should say R.O.T.I. which means Return On Time Invested.

Specifically, the investment is the fifteen minutes that you can use at the end of your day to plan your next day. Simply by taking those few minutes and following a few simple steps, you will very likely experience a minimum of one hour of increased productivity the very next day!

Here are some basics to follow:

Review your list of tasks and mark which ones got done and which are still outstanding.

Note your accomplishments—important for motivation. List your outstanding tasks and any new ones you’d like to get done in your next day’s to-do list. In CRM’s or calendar apps, these are often called “task lists.” If you don’t know where the task list is or how to use it, take a few minutes to learn. A calendar for your appointments is not enough.

Prioritize the tasks as As (need to get done tomorrow) or Bs (important but don’t absolutely have to be done tomorrow).

Put appointments/meetings in the time slots.

Work on one task at a time until you’re done (easier said than done we know) before moving onto the next. Multitasking seems to be a good idea but the lack of focus that comes with it causes ineffectiveness. Recent research shows that it can actually lower your I.Q. too!

Mark off your tasks as you get them done, allowing time for interruptions and unplanned activities.

An added benefit is reducing your stress. Often, as sales professionals, we feel overwhelmed by the tsunami of things we need (or want!) to get done. Let’s face it, a salesperson’s job is never “done.” We could always make more calls or engage in something that will help us grow revenue. That’s a big reason why getting stuff out of your head and onto the plan for the next day makes so much sense. Not only will you feel more in control, but it’ll prevent you from waking up in the middle of the night going through your checklist of things to be done.

Gain up to 30 minutes extra productivity per day by eliminating these.

Show me a sales professional in the top 10% of their industry and I’ll show you a person who is in the top 10% at time management.

Unfortunately, as salespeople, we are hard wired to be poor at juggling priorities and tasks. Studies show that most salespeople fall into the high “Influence” category of personality (from the D.I.S.C. profiling system), meaning that we are very good at influencing, communicating and adapting to change. Time management isn’t one of our strong points however. I’m often asked what biggest mistakes salespeople make are and poor time management ranks in the top 3. As you might expect, when working with sales teams, I have found that while they want to learn new presentation or objection handling techniques, growing their goal and time management capabilities provides the biggest & quickest performance gains.

In my experience, here is where most of us lose massive amounts of selling capacity:

Time Waster Number One—No Plan

We start the month with no specifics on what we want to accomplish. “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.” You should take the 30 minutes at the end of one month to review and plan for the next in all important areas. Similarly you will greatly benefit from planning your week before you set out. Sunday evening is a great time to take 20 minutes and map out your goals/priorities for the week. Time management is largely a result of good priority management. Planning allows you to get the “big picture” and prioritize by comparing the urgency and importance of your goals for the week. Monday morning is OK but is more risky in that you might get distracted and caught up in “doing” before you are finished your “planning”. It is almost impossible to plan and implement at the same time. Below is an example of what a weekly plan might look like:

An “A” priority means that it’s “important and urgent” for the week while a “B” means that while important, it doesn’t necessarily have to be done this week.

Your days should start with a plan too of course, using the same A & B prioritization. Research shows that 10 minutes spent planning your day will give you approximately 60 minutes of increased productivity. That’s a 6:1 R.O.T.I. (return on time invested)! With better time management, many graduates of our “Goal Aligned Time™” program report these results commonly. Done for a week, that will give you the time to make about 25 more prospecting calls. Run that number through your sales funnel stats and you will be astonished by what this means in hard dollars.

Mark Twain famously said, “Eat a frog first thing in the morning and everything else you have to do in the day will seem easy.” Eat your “frog” – do your toughest things that require the most focus – first thing.

Time Waster Number Two—The Email Black Hole

Just like a black hole, the gravitational attraction of email can suck you in just like a planet and once you’re in, there’s no turning back! Email is a very powerful communication tool but overused and often used improperly too. Don’t start your day with email. Start with a plan instead. You don’t need to respond to emails when they come in. Let them stack up and return them in batches at certain intervals in the day. Your average time/message will drop significantly! Low urgency emails can be left to clear at the end of day or even a couple of times/week. Be ruthless with deletion. I often delete messages without looking at them based on the subject and sender. The average person can speak at 120 words/minute yet only type at 30 words/minute.

Time Waster Number Three—Busy But Not Productive

You have three main tasks. Prospect, present and close. If you’re not doing one of these, then you’re not growing your sales. Do a time log for one week, noting your actual use of time in 1 hour blocks. At the end of the week note what activities were directly related to sales, admin and nonsense. You will be amazed where your time is actually going and as a bonus, your productivity will jump as you gain an awareness of this.

Time Waster Number Four—Interruptions

Whether it’s someone walking in to discuss last night’s “American Idol” or your email ringing each time you get a message, you lose much more than the time to chat or listen to the bell. Studies show that the average person, when interrupted, takes 6 minutes to get back to the same level of concentration prior to the interruption. Do the math: If you get interrupted just 5 times in an hour, you are operating at 50% effectiveness. Think about that next time you grab your smart (a misnomer in many ways) phone to check your most recent tweet!

I bet just a few minutes ago! This is a great article inspiring us to change the nasty habit of checking our phone hundreds of times per day into something more meaningful. So many of us mistake being “busy” with being productive. Salespeople, by nature, are very prone to this “busy-ness” syndrome. Doing things that get you closer to you goals is the key and checking emails and texting incessantly doesn’t usually help. Click here to check it out.

Knowing where your time is being used will allow you to spend more time on the sales activities that make you money.
I don’t read many books but at least I try to implement good ideas from the ones I do get around to reading. One of the oldest books on my shelf that is still in my top 10 is “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. The chapter on time management speaks of all activities in you life fitting into one of four quadrants. The concept is that there are two variables that can be attached to any activity: 1) Level of urgency and 2) Level of importance. Plotting one of these against the other produces four quadrants as in the diagram below. Armed with this insight, you’ll be able to make better choices deciding what you’re going to spend your time on and be more effective.

Let’s first be sure we understand the difference between urgency and importance as people often confuse them with each other. “Importance” represents the amount of value that this activity brings to you. A good example would be preparing a proposal for a big prospect. On the other hand, “urgency” refers to how quickly it needs to be done. Responding to a complaint from your biggest customer is a good example of an urgent activity. Combining both urgency and importance allow us to place them in quadrants 1 through 4. You’ll see some examples of common activities also noted in the diagram.

The problem is when we end up spending most of our time reacting to urgent activities, quadrants 1 & 3, the important but non-urgent activities in quadrant 2 take a back seat — sometimes forever! People who live in the world of urgency often love the thrill of the accompanying adrenaline rush but fail to grow. Sadly, they also find themselves suffering from areas of their career and life that have been ignored. We’ve all heard the stories of hard driving executives whose health is failing.

Closer to home, I’ve see countless salespeople who want greater sales success but can’t manage to find the time to attend training sessions or do 1 more hour of prospecting each week. They spend their time on low value, urgent things or even worse, low importance, low urgency activities like surfing the web or watching TV. They “major in the minors.” I’m not saying that web surfing and TV can’t be very entertaining but if it’s at the expense of building your career, getting healthy or spending time with your kids, I’d argue that it’s not the best use of one’s time.

Why does this happen? Because quadrant 2 activities take planning and discipline to happen. They don’t just appear out of nowhere crying for your attention whereas urgent activities, by definition, do. If you don’t workout today, what’s the big deal? It won’t kill you — at least not today. If you don’t make those 3 extra calls, it’s not going to kill your career — at least not today.

Your homework: Set the alarm on your smartphone to alert you every half hour. When it goes off, write down what you did in the last 30 minutes. Do this for 3 days and then mark beside each item which quadrant it falls into. Add them up in total time. I promise you that you will be shocked when you see how much time you are spending in quadrants 3 & 4. I’m also very confident that you will want the time you spent on quadrant 2 activities to increase. The good news is that after this exercise, it will start to happen as you gain increased awareness and focus of where your time is going.

Effective people, in sales or otherwise, are experts in managing their time and have developed a ruthless approach to “time suckers.” Apply this knowledge and you too can be one of these people.